Book picks similar to
Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila by Marianne Villanueva


short-stories
philippines
authors-of-color
filipinx-authors

An Introduction To Philippine History


José S. Arcilla - 1999
    Conceived as "a story to be read, and not a calendar to be memorized," this concise narrative of Philippine history serves as a handy guide for understanding the important highlights of the nation's development.Jose S. Arcilla, S.J., is a member of the department of history at the Ateneo de Manila University and is at present also the archivist of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus. He finished graduate studies in the United States and in Spain. Farther Arcilla, who has authored "Aspects of Wester Medieval Culture", has published in professioal reviews both in the Philippines and abroad. He is the Philippine coordinator for the editorial staff of the "International Jesuit Encyclopedia" being published by the Institute of Jesuit History (Rome).

Meaty


Samantha Irby - 2013
    Every essay is crafted with the same scathing wit and poignant candor thousands of loyal readers have come to expect from visiting her notoriously hilarious blog.

Wade in the Water: Poems


Tracy K. Smith - 2018
    Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United StatesIn Wade in the Water, Tracy K. Smith boldly ties America’s contemporary moment both to our nation’s fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting. These are poems of sliding scale: some capture a flicker of song or memory; some collage an array of documents and voices; and some push past the known world into the haunted, the holy. Smith’s signature voice—inquisitive, lyrical, and wry—turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother, and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men, and violence. Here, private utterance becomes part of a larger choral arrangement as the collection widens to include erasures of The Declaration of Independence and the correspondence between slave owners, a found poem comprised of evidence of corporate pollution and accounts of near-death experiences, a sequence of letters written by African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and the survivors’ reports of recent immigrants and refugees. Wade in the Water is a potent and luminous book by one of America’s essential poets.

Open City


Teju Cole - 2011
    The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife, and Other Stories


Manuel Estabillo Arguilla - 1970
    

Feel Free: Essays


Zadie Smith - 2018
    She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.Arranged into five sections--In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free--this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network--and Facebook itself--really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes--and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive--and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

If You Are Lonely and You Know It (Currency)


Yiyun Li - 2021
    He keeps quiet. He avoids drama. Until one transgression causes an emotional adventure in this heartfelt short story by Yiyun Li, a PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author.Lonely, thanklessly courteous, and without the benefit of status, Gordon Schulmeister is only tolerated in his younger, hip, and gentrified Oakland neighborhood. Now, amid the tensions of a pandemic, the cantankerousness of his landlord, and dog sitting an intimidating pit bull, Gordon has never felt the target on his back so acutely. To keep his neighbors off his heels, with some hope and a sigh, Gordon might have to finally speak up.Yiyun Li’s If You Are Lonely and You Know It is part of Currency, a compounding collection of stories about wealth, class, competition, and collapse. If time is money, deposit here with interest. Read or listen in a single sitting.

Moondogs


Alexander Yates - 2011
     Mourning the recent loss of his mother, twentysome­thing Benicio—aka Benny—travels to Manila to reconnect with his estranged father, Howard. But when he arrives his father is nowhere to be found—leaving an irri­tated son to conclude that Howard has let him down for the umpteenth time. However, his father has actually been kid­napped by a meth-addled cabdriver, with grand plans to sell him to local terrorists as bait in the country’s never-ending power struggle between insurgents, separatists, and “demo­cratic” muscle. Benicio’s search for Howard reveals more about his father’s womanizing ways and suspicious business deals, reopening the old hurts that he’d hoped to mend. Interspersed with the son’s inquiry and the father’s calamitous life in captivity are the high-octane interconnecting narratives of Reynato Ocampo, the local celebrity-hero policeman charged with rescuing Howard; Ocampo’s ragtag team of wizardry-infused soldiers; and Monique, a novice officer at the American embassy whose family still feels feverishly unmoored in the Philippines. With blistering forward momentum, crackling dialogue, wonderfully bizarre turns, and glimpses into both Filipino and expat culture, the novel marches toward a stunning cli­max, which ultimately challenges our conventional ideas of family and identity and introduces Yates as a powerful new voice in contemporary literature.

Darkness Whispers


Richard Chizmar - 2016
    All is well in Windbrook, just like usual, just like always. Nothing changes here, nothing is different. Except... except today something is different. An old man with piercing gray eyes will arrive in town this morning. This man isn't human. Not even close. And he isn't coming alone. Death travels with him. Richard Chizmar, award-winning author of A Long December, and Brian James Freeman, acclaimed author of The Painted Darkness, have combined forces to create an old-fashioned tale of horror, full of good and evil, with a breathtaking ending that will leave you wondering when this peculiar old man might be coming for you.

Prehispanic Source Materials For The Study Of Philippine History


William Henry Scott - 1984
    

Of Cinder and Bone


Kyoko M. - 2016
    That is, until Dr. Rhett “Jack” Jackson and Dr. Kamala Anjali cracked the code to bring them back. Through their research at MIT, they resurrected the first dragon anyone has seen alive since the 15th century. There’s just one problem.Someone stole it.Caught between two ruthless yakuza clans who want to clone the dragon, Jack and Kamala brave the dangerous streets of Tokyo to steal their dragon back in a race against time before the world is taken over by mutated, bloodthirsty monsters that will raze it to ashes. Of Cinder and Bone is an all-new sci-fi romance thriller from the author of the Amazon bestselling Black Parade series.

The Beast: A Chilling True Story of a Psychopathic Child Killer (Ryan Green's True Crime)


Ryan Green - 2021
    He kidnapped, raped and killed six children and teenagers in a single month. While the previous missing children had been treated like runaways, there was now no question that somebody was abducting children in the Lower Mainland area, and the media went berserk.The police immediately came under scrutiny for failing to connect the previous disappearances. The missing person cases were passed to homicide detectives, and a whole new investigation began. The police were now hunting a serial killer and Clifford Olson Junior was one of the main suspects.From the age of seventeen, Clifford Olson Junior spent only 1,501 days outside of prison or jail. If his claims are to be believed, he averaged about one murder every ten days. During his imprisonment, he was assessed on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a tool designed to evaluate psychopathy. The standard threshold is 25-30. He scored a 38 out of 40, the highest rating ever recorded.The Beast is a chilling account of Clifford Olson Junior and one of the most disturbing true crime stories in Canada’s history. Ryan Green’s riveting narrative draws the reader into the real-live horror experienced by the victims and has all the elements of a classic thriller.CAUTION: This book contains descriptive accounts of torture, abuse and violence. If you are especially sensitive to this material, it might be advisable not to read any further.

White Fire


Brian Keene - 2018
    Previously out of print and never before available as a stand-alone, this new edition of WHITE FIRE has been revised and expanded, and is considered the Author’s Preferred Version.

Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night


Morgan Parker - 2015
    Parker’s collection is hyper-contemporary, drawing on what it means to be alive today when our phones autocorrect our texts and we’ve given into a kind of living that prioritizes work, money, and power over justice, equality, and happiness.

Tragic Theater


G.M. Coronel - 2009
    These supernatural beings were believed to be those of the victims from a fatal accident during its hasty construction. Unknown to them, something had long ago taken sanctuary inside the building, feeding on the anger and misery of the victims' souls. They learned this secret too late and walked into a horrifying encounter. This book was adapted into a major motion picture in the Philippines.